Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  “There,” Roderick said. “That was not so terrible, was it?”

  I could have chosen a lot of reactions: shouting at him, laughing at him, making a wisecrack of my own in response. Instead I looked him right in the eye and said, very softly, “Thank you.”

  Roderick closed his eyes, bowed his head forward just a moment in acknowledgement, and walked outside.

  It took us the equivalent of two days of our perceived time to walk all the way back to Raleigh, stepping between cars and walking the emergency lane along the side of the Interstate. At first we pointed out all the birds frozen in mid-flight and the bugs half-smashed on windshields and the accident someone was just about to have, but eventually even those marvels got old and we grew quiet. Even Jennifer stopped asking questions eventually. Jennifer and Dan never needed to take a piss or eat or anything. Seth said he’d never done this with mortals, so he didn’t know that. He just figured they would have to starve for a couple of days but it beat the alternative.

  Dog and Smiles sniffed everything we walked past, at first, but they gave up when they realized nothing in the wide gray world smelled like anything at all.

  The whole way home I thought about how precious little I actually know about the kind of creature I am. But then, who really knows themselves?

  “I should warn you,” Seth said when he dropped Jennifer and Dan off outside Dan’s apartment. “You’re going to be dropped back into normal time when I get… a certain distance away. When that happens, all the delayed time is going to hit you. You’ll be exhausted and starving and you’ll need to…” He gestured vaguely at his torso.

  “Got it,” Jennifer said.

  Dan and Roderick exchanged a look, and squeezed each other’s hands just once.

  I turned to Jennifer, on the spur of the moment, and said without preamble, “Revenge is not enough.”

  She blinked at me.

  I stared her right in the eye, and I didn’t use the hoodoo, and it wasn’t just because I knew it wouldn’t work on her. I wanted to persuade her as a friend, as a compatriot, not as a supernatural being. “Revenge will poison you, and you are too good for that. If you want to keep fighting, I want to fight by your side, but you have to fight for something. It isn’t enough to drive a stake through the heart of the past. We have to fight to make something good happen in the future.”

  Jennifer didn’t nod, and she didn’t agree, but she didn’t disagree, either. So I walked away.

  Seth took Marty and Roderick and me to my house in Raleigh. We wound our way there through the beginnings of morning rush hour. I saw Ken Watanabe from the neighborhood association’s executive board, just about to turn out onto the main road on his way to work.

  Marty and Roderick walked inside after saying their thanks and goodbyes.

  “You’re welcome to stay here with me during the day,” I said to Seth. Beth was hanging beside him, going with him to her place or his. It was deeply strange, indescribably surreal, to know full well our enemies were all still back there in Sunset Beach, in that ratty old hotel-turned-science-lab, waiting between moments for time to resume and for the frozen sunrise to end them forever.

  I thought of that bartender, who hadn’t even been a vampire a week before when I questioned her about Crew Cut’s whereabouts. The local vampires didn’t even think he was worth going after when one of them knew exactly where he was. Nothing mattered to them except trying to bring back The Rhinemaiden so they could kill her again. I almost felt sorry for them, but not quite. They were a bunch of right bastards. They’d emptied out a whole town. In a town like that, where the permanent residents are few to none, would anyone even notice they were gone? The rental management companies could make deposits to accounts, and those balances would build up over time, and mortgage payments would get auto-deducted, and the whole town might run on autopilot for who knew how long? Years, probably.

  I held out my hand to Seth, and he took it, and we shook. “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.” He shrugged a little.

  “I’m sorry you got dragged back into things. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “I know,” Seth replied.

  “I won’t blame you if you make yourself scarce now.” I nodded at the gray world around us, frozen still. The two days of perceived time as we all walked back from Sunset Beach didn’t result in us all bonding over rounds of campfire songs or anything. Rather, we all grew quiet and withdrawn, retreating into our own heads for most of the trip.

  Seth sucked his teeth for a second and shook his head. “Nah,” he said, looking at his boots. “Nah.” He looked up again and smiled. “See you around, Boss.”

  “See you around.”

  I shut my door, walked inside, and joined Roderick and Marty upstairs in my bedroom with the blacked out windows and the triple-layered curtains and the plywood nailed over the glass.

  “Cousin,” Roderick said, though his eyes were on Marty. “What happens next?”

  Outside, I heard a bird chirp. My house went from gray on gray to beige on beige. The time freeze ended. Sunrise was less than a minute away for Raleigh.

  I slipped off my big black trench coat, kicked off my boots, and untucked my shirt so I could properly relax. “We’ve been running around for years – hell, our whole lives – while a war waited for us. So let’s go finish it.” I glanced at myself in the mirror of my dressing table. My hair was a mess. I looked back at Roderick. “We’re going to Charlotte.”

  Roderick smiled. “Yes,” he said, but it was more like a sigh of pleasure than a spoken word.

  My phone started ringing, and I made a little sound when I looked at who was calling: Agatha, my maker.

  I swiped it with my fingers and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  Agatha employs a small army of “staff,” most of them being foot soldiers and hired thugs. She’s a big wig in the power structure in Atlanta, and across the whole Southeast, and by then I knew she maintained whatever authority she had as much through fear and intimidation as through anything more like loyalty or kind regard. Decades ago I was her best muscle, the guy she sent in to knock heads until she got her way. These days she has a whole bunch of vampires to do that for her. Sometimes I wonder if the reason she let me cut the apron strings wasn’t that I was too strong to control but that she just didn’t need me anymore. I was such small potatoes compared to whatever she had going on, what did I matter?

  I expected the person on the other end of the call to be one of her servants, but it was Agatha herself. Her voice was rich and mellow and smooth, just like always, and it sounded like it could talk the sweet out of sugar. She also sounded angry. “What exactly did you just do?”

  “Huh?” That’s me, the picture of eloquence.

  “Something big just happened. Tell me what you did.” It was the hoodoo, and for all that I am good with the hoodoo, I remind you Agatha is the one who taught me. Hers is good enough to work over the phone, from hundreds of miles away.

  I opened my mouth to speak.

  The sun came up.

  My eyes slammed shut, and I slept like the dead.

  Epilogue One

  “You didn’t think that would hurt me, did you?” Ross’ voice was deep and smooth, like the sort of clear mountain spring in which careless children drown.

  Roderick stopped a few feet from the doorway to Seth’s bar. He looked at his watch: half-past midnight. He had a lot to get done before he drove back to Asheville. He didn’t have time for this shit, and the watch-check was calculated to communicate exactly that. “Oh, Ross. Still trying to go for the dramatic entrances? What do you think this is, a rerun of Dark Shadows?” Roderick turned and smirked from behind reflective glasses.

  Three weeks had passed. Roderick studied the demon’s face for signs of scarring, of lingering damage from the silver dollars he pressed to its face. Ross looked exactly as he always looked. Roderick blinked and looked more closely, sliding the glasses down his nose with a wiggle of hi
s ears. Yes, exactly the same – almost. Not quite. There were changes. The demon had needed to heal.

  “Very cute,” Ross said. He pursed his lips a little, just slightly pouty, the sort of petulant expression that begged to be kissed or slapped.

  “I know I am, and thank you, but you are not my type.” Roderick turned to walk inside, but Ross reached out and grabbed Roderick’s twig-thin upper arm in his comparatively massive hand.

  “You don’t get to walk away from me, leech.” Ross growled it, angry, deadly serious.

  People walked past. The part of downtown Raleigh where Seth’s bar stood was once called the warehouse district. Back then, it folded up at night, slightly embarrassed by its major tenants: a few porn stores, a gay bar, a lot of whores. In the last ten years it became trendy and flourished. Now there were people all around. There were million-dollar condos to mark the grave of the last porn store to disappear. The people who lived there liked to pretend the neighborhood owed them something for showing up to save it. As far as Roderick could tell, real estate was just a more-wicked relative of the porn trade. They both sold mostly fantasies, but nobody ever went bankrupt buying porn.

  No one glanced at the man and the boy having a tiff on the street. Noticing that sort of thing might lead to a 911 call, and 911 calls were bad for property values.

  “I know what you’re up to, Roderick, and it won’t work.” Ross hissed it, like the words themselves pissed him off.

  Roderick smiled. “I do believe you are afraid of me. Even more so than before.”

  “I fear no material being.” Ross smiled back, but it took effort to do so.

  “And yet you grab my arm, and you clamp down like you are a little concerned I might be able to pull away. You hate me, Ross. You hate me so much you cannot express it. But you cannot remember why. You have a fascination with me, yet you cannot remember why. Is that not interesting?”

  Ross blinked a few times in rapid succession but said nothing.

  “I know why,” Roderick said. “I could even explain it to you. But it would not work. Just like you do not remember the other deputy, you will not remember what I tell you.”

  Ross tightened his grip on Roderick’s upper arm and, for a long time, said nothing. They simply stared at one another. Roderick cocked his head to one side but didn’t try to push into Ross’ mind. He was mad – he knew that about himself – but he wasn’t crazy.

  Eventually, Ross licked his lips. “Tell me.”

  “Ah,” Roderick breathed. He lifted one hand and put a fingertip to Ross’ chin, tracing the divot in its center, that movie-star dimple so loved in the monochrome heroes of old. “So you admit this fascination? This desire to understand?”

  Ross tightened his grip again. “Tell. Me.”

  So Roderick did.

  Thirty seconds later Ross was standing there, blinking, looking a little confused as to where he was or why. Roderick watched the look of comprehension and fear on Ross’ face fade, like an old film reel burning up, as the things Roderick said simply melted away again.

  “Oh, and,” Roderick said as he peeled Ross’ fingers off his upper arm, one by one, “Hands off the merchandise.”

  Epilogue Two

  We held a funeral for Old Shoe. It didn’t seem right not to.

  Roderick asked why I wanted to memorialize a traitor, so I reminded him Old Shoe kind of tried to un-traitor at the last second. It didn’t save him, and I haven’t let myself answer the question of whether it would have saved him in the long run even if it saved him right then. I might have killed him anyway, and I’ll never know for sure.

  Seth and Beth and Roderick and I got together at Seth’s bar. I bought a casket and had it delivered there, and even though it was empty we talked over it like it had him inside. That’s the thing about a funeral: honoring the dead doesn’t actually figure too much into them. If there’s a body on display, most of the people there just want to see how they looked in the end. If there’s no body, they want to see how everyone else dressed. Funerals are rituals for the living. They’re a way survivors can grant themselves permission to say goodbye.

  I’m not judging, mind you. I like closure as much as the next guy, even if I’m avoiding it as hard as I can.

  I told a couple of funny stories about Old Shoe, times he cracked wise or came up with a particularly useful bit of gossip. Beth talked about how he used to come around her club after hours, when even the dancers were gone home for the night, and play cards. Seth told about sneaking into the sewers one night and sneaking up and surprising Old Shoe, kind of beating him at his own game for once. Seth looked like he wished he could blush when he told that story, like he felt dumb admitting he did something so youthful, and we all kind of laughed. Seth still looks like he’s maybe 20. I figure adding a zero would just be the beginning of a more accurate count.

  Roderick didn’t have a single thing to say, but he watched and smiled and chuckled as appropriate, and so as usual my cousin played the role of the living in our drama of the undead.

  When we were done telling a few stories, Seth asked what was next.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a funeral for a vampire before.”

  “Where are we burying him?” Roderick asked.

  “I always met him out at a specific graveyard,” I said. “I figured we could have a little procession, take him out there.”

  Seth looked at me. “The corporate memorial garden place? Out on Glenwood?”

  I shrugged. “I know. It’s a hell of a walk.”

  “Walk?” Roderick arched an eyebrow.

  “Well, I ain’t exactly going to tie a casket to the roof of the Firebird,” I said. I looked meaningfully at Seth.

  He sighed a little. “This better not become a habit.”

  There was a sound like a gong, far underwater, and everything turned gray.

  I hefted the empty casket onto my left shoulder. “I’ll carry him.”

  “No,” Beth said. “We all carry him. He tried to save all of us.”

  So we all carried him, in his empty casket, out into a street full of frozen cars, and frozen people, and frozen time. We walked in silence, past all those frozen lives, between frozen moments. We went to the farthest, oldest corner of Raleigh’s biggest, most generic graveyard: not the section where they bury people now with memorial plaques low enough to the ground they can mow right over them, but to the part that was once a church cemetery, where the dead were too old for there to be any living left to know them. We dug a grave and put Old Shoe’s casket in it, covered it back up, and walked back to Seth’s bar through that eternally still gap between instants.

  The people on the sidewalk, the people in the frozen cars we wove between, none of them noticed us. They couldn’t. From their perspective we never passed. We disappeared from the stream of time, into our own not-moment, and I tried hard not to think just how on-the-nose it was.

  I like to think Seth’s power to take us out of the world is the exception, not an exaggeration of the way things always already are. I’ve realized something, though. Making it be that way – making it be that I’m a part of the world of the living, that we all are, and that we don’t disappear into our own legends of ourselves and pull the world shut behind us – is something we have to do ourselves. We can’t be passive forever. In the end, life is lived by those who show up.

  About the Author

  Michael G. Williams is a native of the mountains of western North Carolina. He is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi and believes strongly in the power of found families. Michael lives in Durham with his partner, two cats and more and better friends than he probably deserves.

  Michael earned a BA in Performance Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and works as an engineer. He has been a successful participant in National Novel Writing Month for many years and encourages anyone interested in writing to jump headlong into the deep end of insanity for thirty days. More information can be found at www.nanowrimo.org.
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  Copyright 2017 by Michael G. Williams

  Published by Falstaff Books

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design - Natania Barron

  Print Book Design - Susan H. Roddey www.shroddey.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is merely a coincidence. But you’re so vain, you probably think this story is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?

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  with work from:

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